Author
For searching for papers by a particular author(surname). If you know the surname and initials of a particular author, eg A.W. Skempton, type it in as SKEMPTON*A*W. If you know the surname but not the initials type it in as SKEMPTON*. You can search for up to two authors at a time.

Title
For searching for specific words in the title, you can enter a string, keywords and wildcards. For example:

dam and concrete will return any title with this phrase, in this order
dam*concrete will return any title with the word dam followed by concrete
concrete*dam will return any title with the word concrete followed by dam
concrete dam will return any title with these words, in this order
*amp* will return every instance of amp in any position of every word in the database (e.g. damping, sample etc.)

Keyword
For general subject searching. Generally the plural form of nouns has been used e.g. dams. If you are unsure how a term may have been entered use a '*' to truncate. For example:
SEISM* will find seismic, seismology etc. You can use up to four keywords.

Advanced searching (title and keyword fields)
As well as supporting the * wildcard character, the following characters can be used.

The [ ] keys can be used to replace a specific range of characters. For example: [0-9]19 will return 019, 119, 219 etc.

The [ ^ ] keys will match characters which fall outside a specified range of characters. For example:
[ ^ s]am will return damping, amplification, beams but not sampling.

Location
For searching papers which are specific to a particular location eg. for a paper on Denver International Airport, enter DENVER in this field and AIRPORTS in the keyword field.

Country
For searching more generally on a particular country eg. for papers on American airports, enter USA in this field and AIRPORTS in the keyword field. If a country has changed names e.g. Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, Tanganyika/Tanzania it is recommend you do separate searches under all names.

Date
For searching either in a particular year or over a range of dates. If you want to specify a particular year, enter it in both 'from' and the 'to' boxes. If you just enter a date in the from box it will search from that date onto the latest year. The virtual library contains papers that are more than three years old. Current papers (current year and previous two years) are held on the Thomas Telford Journals website.